


One Week in May

by adnauseam



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Developing Relationship, Jeeves POV, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25069951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/pseuds/adnauseam
Summary: It's spring 1932, all of Bertie's friends seem to be getting married, and something is changing.
Relationships: Reginald Jeeves/Bertram "Bertie" Wooster
Comments: 20
Kudos: 119





	One Week in May

**Author's Note:**

> my love to everyone in this fandom <3
> 
> set sometime after _Right Ho, Jeeves_ but before _Much Obliged, Jeeves/Jeeves and the Tie That Binds_

We stood together under a wet, pink sky. I was observing a particularly heavy cumulonimbus without any real feeling and letting Mr Wooster’s words wash over me without paying much attention. It was a warm, slippery spring shower, running between my clothes and my skin, hair and neck sticky with displaced pomade.

I could visualise him as a child quite clearly, running through a storm like this and whooping. His face was turned up to the sky and his eyes were closed. As he talked his mouth opened darkly and the water washed in.

We were on the outskirts of a wedding, watching it proceed under the marquee, white and red roses untouched by the sudden storm. I was one pace behind him, as would be considered proper – as no doubt he would think my feudal spirit would esteem proper – until he turned to face me and we both looked out from the wedding at the long expanse of downward sloping fields.

Abruptly he stopped and half-smiled at me, completely soaked. It might have been a smile of recognition between us, of complicity or secret, shared knowledge, but it was too faint and vanishing for that. It was not the smile he would bestow upon a casual acquaintance, nor a close friend. I had not seen it before.

Nobody would know, looking at him, that last night I had pressed him into the mattress and away from my own clinging body; nobody could possibly guess. The ground was beginning to become unstable and waterlogged beneath my feet. My heel settled firmly further down into the mud.

“I hate weddings,” he announced cheerfully, loud enough to be heard over the clamour of the party and the storm.

“Indeed, sir?” I replied, not loud enough to be heard, though he knew what I had said anyway.

“Yes,” he said, and turned his face up to the heavens again. The sky cleared rapidly, blue springing from the east and prying apart the clouds overheard.

*

It had started some months before that wedding and before that particular storm. I had imagined it happening in so many different ways, but it was not as noble as I imagined; quite simply, he watched me carefully one night from his bed, with a curious tilt to his head as I put away his clothes, and watched me as I left. He had always been very aware of me, to an extent that I was never quite comfortable with, but he had never watched me as gravely as this, nor with such concentration. In the morning I kissed him.

I had wanted him before quite distantly; I visualised it as I drifted off to sleep, sometimes, and occasionally the desire grew acute enough that I might have identified it as longing, but it never felt quite real. It was like a familiar figure at some distance from me; I was acquainted enough with its features that I knew what it might look like up close, but it was not.

I wanted him afterwards quite differently – it was urgent and unavoidable and compulsive – yet it still seemed at a distance, intangible, and in a strange way easily separable from myself. Nothing about our daily routine changed. I did not wish for it to. He did not seem to wish for any change either.

We said very little about it, even that first time, and I was urgent to keep it that way, protective of the silence, unwilling to speak to him as I did during the day, unwilling to hear him speak to me as he did during the day, but I did not need to do anything to enforce that silence, because he did not try to strike up conversation. Throughout the proceedings he would always seem shocked, even bewildered.

The first time, he said my name as he climaxed, startled.

*

He was disinclined to mingle much among the reception, and we left early, sodden feet squelching and crunching along the gravel drive to his car.

“Awful blighter, the groom, what?” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat.

“Some might call him grating, sir,” I replied. The groom in question was indeed awful and I saw no reason to pretend not. I was in no mood to.

“Yes,” he said in a significant tone, under his breath, searching for his cigarette case in the inside of his coat pocket. He made a face when he retrieved it – it had sprung a leak and the contents were soaked through.

I gave him one of mine and lit it in his mouth, without really thinking about it. His hair flopped damply over his forehead.

*

“All this death do us part stuff,” he began, wrestling with his socks.

“Yes, sir?” I inquired, after a long pause in which I inspected his jacket, which I feared was not salvageable.

“Oh nothing, Jeeves. It’s just. Dashed strange when you think about it, what?”

“I am not sure what you mean, sir,” I said and truly I did not. Matrimony did not appeal to me as I knew it did not appeal to him, but it had never been strange; in my younger years it had seemed inevitable.

“Only, it strikes me that none of these couples,” – we’d been to rather a few weddings in the last year or so – “are more united after holy whatsit than before.”

“To a pair already united in heart and soul, perhaps marriage can be looked upon as a mere formality,” I replied.

“No. I mean.” His face was screwed up with concentration. I watched the insight slip away from him. “It’s awfully lonely, isn’t it?”

I did not know how to answer that. Instead I knelt to unbutton his shirt. His hands dropped down to clutch at the mattress.

I drew in a breath, quickly. He bit his lip and looked somewhere over my right shoulder, forehead wrinkling. I felt very aware, very suddenly, of my own body: the pain in my knees, digging into the floor, the clinging of my wet clothes, my heart quickening. In all the months that we had been spending our nights together, not once had my duties as his valet been compromised, not once had routine tasks become erotic; I’d too much training and too much experience not to be clinical, and I had told myself that I must be efficient.

I did not feel efficient now. My hands shook. His skin was goose flesh all over. I managed to wrench his shirt from him and stand up, leaving him to undo his trousers. The shirt was unsalvageable.

I drew him a bath with the door open and I could feel his eyes on me; after I finished and stepped back into the bedroom, he hovered in the doorway and did not close it. I fought the urge to follow after him, instead making my escape to the servants’ quarter, to change.

*

I laid out his nightwear on his bed, aware that he was watching me from the bathtub, with his head resting on his knees, knotted up.

“Thank you, Jeeves,” he said suddenly. He often thanked me, when most other gentlemen would not think to, but very rarely without a specific reason.

“Not at all, sir,” I replied, letting the question hang around my words. He took his head off his knees and put a hand on the rim of the bathtub, but did not climb out; with a strange sensation in my throat I turned away from him and straightened the already straightened sheets, listening intently to the splashing of the water and the pattering of his feet on the tile. I held still.

We were not in our own flat, of course, and had to be discreet, but we had not been refraining, and the usual routine was that I would come to him after all duties were attended to and finished, when before he would have turned the light out and myself left the room.

That night, as I leant in, swayed in towards him, he turned his face away abruptly and said, fidgeting with the sheets, “Ah, no, Jeeves.”

I drew back. Something liquid emptied in my chest and leaked down my sides. I left.

*

It was not, I thought as I lay in my narrow bed listening to the snoring of the under butler, that I had necessarily expected we would come together that night; it had been an exhausting day and it was not as if we imbibed every night normally anyway. But he had never rejected me as strangely as that.

In the close dark I started to fear that he did not want me anymore, that he felt repelled by me, that he would wish for me to leave his service. Rationally, I knew that this was unlikely, but the memory of his expression haunted me, distressed and alien. I could not make sense of it.

With no small amount of pain, as I drifted off to sleep, I kept seeing his left knee, twitching slightly as it did whenever he came. I could not bring myself to fully believe that I would never see it again.

*

The next day dawned bright and clear, though he did not appreciate me pointing this out to him as he normally might.

“Expunge the valiant air of dawn from the old bean this morning,” he said, cheerfully enough. “I think we should make off post-haste, wouldn’t you say?”

It was not precisely common for him to ask my opinion in this manner, but not out of the ordinary either. “Certainly, sir.”

His mouth turned downwards at this, though he attempted to hide his grimace by swallowing his tea. I struggled to identify what might be troubling him. He had not had the opportunity to get himself engaged without me knowing – he had not even the opportunity to entangle himself in one of his friends’ problems – but I could not think of anything I had done that would displease him either.

“Will that be all, sir?” I asked, more quietly than was my wont. Inwardly I rebuked myself; it was always better to keep these external issues from affecting me, to keep calm and above it all. Otherwise I would not keep focus when he needed me. The last time I had let him shake me, I had been unnecessarily vicious – and I still remembered, with an odd twang in my chest, the way he had looked at me on returning to Brinkley Court, betrayed and yet subdued, soaked through and trembling. I had told myself then that it would not do, to let myself be so affected.

Though I was not angry at him, as I had been on that occasion.

“I.” He swallowed. “Yes, Jeeves.”

I let my posture show my displeasure, but he said nothing else, so I left.

*

He spent most of the next week outside of the flat, though I was not sure exactly where he went – he could not be at his club the entire time, but I could not muster the energy to make enquiries. I did not ask him directly, nor even indirectly. He volunteered nothing.

This left me with long, uneventful hours that stretched out before me without end. If I could not pinpoint the reason for this avoidance – if, of course, he _was_ avoiding me – then I could not predict how it might change. He seemed further and further away every minute of the day and at noon the sun stretching languorously over the floorboards was utterly empty.

The sixth day after we returned from the wedding, I forced myself to think about the conversation on the last evening of the visit. I knew that I ought to have before, but I had locked it away – I was loath to dwell on it, because for a reason I could not articulate, it cut deeply.

He must be dissatisfied with our relations, perhaps he even wanted to be married, to find a bride at last. I did not want to leave his employ. I hated the thought of it. I hated even more the panicked scrambling of my mind at the prospect of it, my inability to think clearly – if he married –

But that was not quite what he had said. _It’s awfully lonely._

I did not know what he meant. It had not occurred to me to be lonely.

I was cold with him: I made no remarks about the weather nor offered literary allusions; I glared at his ties, even the perfectly acceptable ones. He needed me, I told myself, and would come to me eventually.

*

I was not wrong.

He came in at quarter past three in the morning; long after I would normally wait up for him. I told myself I was not waiting for him, that I was simply finding it hard to sleep.

The night was still, quiet, and comfortingly stale, and I was sitting upright in my bed reading poetry I had read before when I heard the front door open and close. Immediately I was on edge – I would not expect him to be sober coming home at such an hour – but the thud of the door was quiet, even tentative.

It would have been easier and entirely justifiable if I had left him to his own devices. It would have been wise. But instead some vicious instinct rose up in me. I wanted him to see me unaffected and imposing.

On entering the hallway it became clear that he was inebriated: he was flushed and leaning on the wall, coat half off and staring with intense focus into empty air. He did not look towards me.

“Do you require assistance, sir?” I asked him coolly.

“Oh, no, Jeeves,” he said but he did not move off the wall. I approached him and took his coat and hat. “I’m quite alright, really. You don’t need – I know it’s late –” But he still did not move. I hung up his hat carefully.

“Do you require further assistance, sir?” I asked, as if I had not heard him. He was still staring at the air.

“ _No_ , Jeeves,” he said sharply. He wrenched himself off the wall and moved towards his bedroom, stumbling a little, pathetically.

I took his elbow. He shook me off and tripped at the threshold, swaying ludicrously towards the floor; I caught him, feeling uneasiness squirm in my chest. I still did not know what was wrong. He clutched at my wrist as I helped him upright and did not let go, even as I began to urge him further towards the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he said urgently, “I’m sorry, Jeeves, I didn’t mean to displease you.” I guided him down onto the bed, but he still did not let go, gripping at my hand now, crunching the bones together. He met my eyes as if from a very long way away. “I’m sorry.”

“I do not know what you mean, sir,” I told him, in my most blandly reassuring tones.

“I’m sorry,” he continued desperately, “I just couldn’t anymore.”

I stared at him. The night surrounding us was very quiet. He let go.

I could not think of what to say. It was like any number of the nightmares I had endured over the last week: him not wanting me anymore, his never having wanted me, a permanent break in our relations. I found myself desperately clinging onto the fact that he had not dismissed me. Not dismissed me yet.

He stared at me as if shocked by the words that had left his mouth.

In the long, stricken silence that followed, I found myself trying to twist the words into something more palatable, something that would make _sense_ , but I could not. I never could. He began to try and speak again, but nothing came out but uncertain, meaningless fragments of sentences.

And I could not bear to hear him expand on it, to try and soften the blow as he would feel compelled to or lay bare the logic of his decision. I could not bear it.

“Good night, sir,” I said stiffly, and departed.

*

The sun first caught the spines of my natural history books, piled neatly by a small, high window that let the sun in only for a few hours of the day, even in summer. It glanced off their clean, methodically dusted edges. I rarely read natural history, even though it was inordinately relaxing: the categorisation of things and the endless faraway days of my childhood. I watched the light creep towards me, knowing from a long inhabitation of the room that it would not reach me, would never stretch so close. My bones ached dully.

Moving automatically without consideration for feeling, I let my limbs align themselves into human form and ignored the lead that had replaced my blood: good, I would not have to fear passion overtaking me, not today, not ever.

I washed my face, the back of my neck, behind my ears. I stripped to the waist, washed under my arms. The air filled with the sickly, clinical scent of the soap. Dressing took perhaps more time than usual, but I had plenty of time. My hair was coaxed easily into its meek, fixed shape with brilliantine. I allowed myself a few seconds to pause and look into the empty street.

I had taken, in the last few months, to doing some light dusting in the morning before making Mr. Wooster his tea; I thought of it as a sort of buffer between the night and the day. But I did not busy myself with it that morning, thinking back to the previous week of empty, gaping time. I could occupy myself with it later.

Instead, I put the kettle on and sat at the kitchen table. I made myself work out a plan for if I was asked to resign: what I would need to pack, what I would tell the agency, where I would go.

I could not help but let gloom set in. I had been so long in the employ of Mr. Wooster that I did not know how I might behave or who I might be without him. The thought of silently working for an absent or uncaring master was deeply unattractive, and I could not quite conceive of how I had managed before I had met him, even though I had spent years like that, more years in fact than I had spent with him.

*

If there was one constant in my life, it was that Mr. Wooster would not rise before nine at the very earliest, and not before ten unless there was something deeply wrong. It surprised me immensely to find him pushing open the door to the kitchen only a few minutes before eight.

He looked much calmer than he had been the night before, though he was pale and dark under the eyes, with a sort of shaken aspect. I suspected that he had not slept at all.

“I, ah.”

I stood, belatedly. He looked as though something very painful was pulling at him and it was discomforting to see him so subdued. Could we come back from this? I had known all along, I realised, that this was wrong, that I had damaged everything beyond repair. I should never—

“Jeeves,” he said, and set his mouth, meeting my eyes. “It’s like the fellow is always saying, to hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit. Only I don’t think I can expect you to hear with your eyes, what? That’s what ears are for, surely, even if I haven’t been making a jot of sense.”

“Sir?”

He took a deep breath and closed the door behind him. A brief, wobbly silence. It was clear that he was struggling with something immensely and I felt profoundly small, to not know what it was or how to fix it. I had been made to feel helpless now for so long that I felt anger rising up. I stifled it.

“I had hoped that, perhaps—oh, this is dashed difficult. I had hoped that, maybe, you might want—might want more than what we had.”

“Sir?”

He flinched.

I took in an unsteady breath and watched him watching me. For perhaps the first time in my life, I had no idea at all of how this might go. It was unthinkable, to imagine what I knew now he longed for, unthinkable to conduct myself in such a fashion. Some years ago I would have dismissed it out of hand without any trouble. Now—

The mind may not remember pain, but the body always will and it cannot help but flinch from it. Throughout my life I had always prided myself on carrying on regardless, but I must have lost the skill somewhere along the way, discarded along with what I thought of as my pride and my integrity and my hard won solitude.

How could I? How could I not?

I took a breath, released it. His face, always so expressive, crumpled minutely in front of me; the clock ticked cruel and simple.

“Bertie.” It was like walking into empty space.

“You don’t have to, old thing,” he said, more warmly and with an approximation of a smile. I had moved closer to him without realising it. Some quality of joy was emerging into his eyes and he was trembling almost imperceptibly; I could see the pain in him now and the pain that was to come and I saw the thing such suffering might fashion between us.

“If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death,” I told him, moving closer still.

“Shakespeare?” he asked on an upwards breath.

No going back, no more hesitation: I saw what must be done and I closed the distance completely.

*

*

*


End file.
